Just Keep Growing
July 19, 2026 • The 8th Sunday after Pentecost • Proper 11A
Isaiah 44:6-8 • Romans 8:12-25 • Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Every spring, while the rest of our lawn lies dormant, a few bright patches of green spring up. Vibrant indications of the changing season, these tufts of soft, thin-bladed grass grow quickly and soon display their silvery spikelets, ready to release their seeds. When the rest of the grass awakens and turns green, these first-to-grow patches are most easily distinguished by their taller, more thickly clumped sprouts, but they soon become unmistakable because, as the heat of summer arrives, they wither and turn brown, leaving bare spots in our lawn.
Poa annua or annual bluegrass or annual meadow grass is a frustrating and persistent weed that affects many of us. We pay companies to treat our lawns with preemergent weed control in the hopes that the Poa annua will stay away, but seeds that are already in the soil seem to sprout no matter what. As an herbicide-resistant weed, Poa annua is hard to eradicate once it starts to grow, and pulling it from the ground does little to prevent next year’s growth. But there are some places where it grows not as a weed but as a carefully cultivated plant.
In the eighteenth century, English horticulturalists noticed that Poa annua seemed to flourish on rural paths but did not grow on adjacent hillsides. It wasn’t long before this “path grass” became a favorite for well-trodden areas with compacted soil. Despite its invasive qualities, it remains a favorite among some golf course greenskeepers, who use it to give putting greens consistent coverage despite all the foot traffic. As nine-time major championship superintendent Paul Latshaw once said, “Poa annua has probably saved more superintendents’ positions than it’s destroyed” (https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/course-care/green-section-record/61/issue-17/understanding-poa-annua.html).
But I don’t care how pretty the greens are at Oakmont Country Club. Every spring, when those bright green patches break through my otherwise dormant lawn, I feel the urge to call our lawn company and say, “Didn’t you apply a preemergent treatment? Where did all these weeds come from?” But I’m sure their answer would be, “An enemy has done this.”
Life is full of weeds—lawns, gardens, and fields; friendships, families, and marriages; universities, businesses, and churches. Every corner of our lives is subject to invasion by nutrient-sucking, sunshine-stealing, space-crowding weeds that we don’t want. And some of those weeds feel really threatening. The truth is that I can live with Poa annua, and I might even enjoy a salad made with dandelion greens, but there are some weeds that represent a real and dangerous threat to God’s people and their flourishing. Where do those weeds come from? What are we supposed to do about them? And why does God allow them to persist even though they make life so hard for God’s children?
These are the sorts of questions Jesus addresses when he tells the parable of the wheat and the weeds. One of the reasons Jesus uses parables to describe the kingdom of God is because they allow him to present simple, straightforward truths about God’s reign that don’t fit within the wisdom of the world. Those who belong to God’s kingdom, Jesus tells us, receive these parables with child-like simplicity, and those who are immersed in the ways of the world are frustrated by their strangeness. Parables are never intended as complete portrayals of God’s kingdom. Instead, they give us a sharp, singular look at a particular characteristic of what our lives are like when we belong fully to God, and those glimpses are usually found at the place where the other-worldly description of God’s reign feels most strange to us. In today’s gospel, that strangeness is found in the householder’s decision to let the wheat and the weeds grow up together.
“Didn’t you sow good seed in your field?” the laborers ask when they see that the field of wheat is also full of weeds. “Where, then, did these weeds come from?” “An enemy has done this,” the master replies. We might look down upon those conservative religious traditions that are quick to attribute bad things to spiritual enemies like Satan or the devil, but Jesus makes it clear that God is not responsible for the evil that plagues our lives. Someone else is actively working against God and God’s reign, which means that the kingdom of God is not manifest only in those places where weeds are kept at bay. It grows in us and among us even when the forces of evil are sprouting all around.
We must not despair, Jesus teaches us, when bad things happen nor when evil takes root and flourishes in our lives. God is still God, and those weeds are not a sign that God’s kingdom is being overwhelmed, even when to us they feel overwhelming. And, as strange as it seems to a farmer or a gardener, God’s kingdom is a place where wheat and weeds grow up together.
“Do you want us to go and gather the weeds?” the laborers ask the householder, offering the standard, common-sense remedy for the invasive plants. “No,” the master replies, surprising us and them, “for in gathering them you would uproot the wheat along with them.” Sometimes scholars try to find an agricultural reason to let the wheat and the weeds grow together. Maybe the weeds were a particular species of poisonous rye grass that, when freshly sprouted, was nearly impossible to differentiate from the wheat and that, by the time its leaves were distinguishable, had deep roots that would be entangled with the farmer’s crop. But surely the purpose of the parable is not to teach us about the agricultural practices of the ancient world but to help us gain an insight into why a loving God would allow the lives of his children to be impacted by evil and why Jesus, who brought God’s kingdom to the earth, doesn’t rid the world of evil once and for all.
We want God to hurry up and make everything right, but God chooses to allow the wheat and the weeds to grow up together until the harvest. That doesn’t make sense to us, but somehow it makes sense to God. We want Jesus’ victory over sin and death to be fully realized here and now, but the promised day of judgment is still ahead of us, and faithfulness in our day means continuing to grow and bear fruit despite the hardships we encounter. We expect unabated weeds to undermine our place in God’s kingdom, threatening the viability of the seeds that God has planted, but there is nothing that the enemy can do to prevent God’s reign from coming to its perfection within us. Jesus urges us to have hope and to hold on.
Our instinct is to see a patch of Poa annua sprouting up in our lawn and to be discouraged by the imperfection that interrupts an otherwise monocultural landscape. But the kingdom of God is not a place where only desirable plants take root—a life in which only good things happen. The kingdom is the goodness of God that grows within us despite the challenges and hardships we face. It is the fruit that God bears in our lives no matter what seems to stand in the way of that fruitfulness. Today, Jesus reminds us that getting rid of the weeds isn’t our job. And thanks be to God for that! Our job is to trust in the one who promises to bring us into the kingdom and who assures us that nothing can keep us away.
© 2026 Evan D. Garner
